1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to searching content managed by a search engine using queries of a type associated with relational database management systems, and more specifically, to querying full text search engines using structured query language statements via a Java database connectivity interface.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Many organizations use full text search engines to manage information, which may be stored in sources internal and/or external to the organization. An index of documents is built by visiting and extracting (“crawling”) content in the sources. Metadata fields may be defined and included in the index as well as the content and all of the words contained therein. The index is then used to identify documents that match criteria specified in a full text search query.
Documents in the index may have implied relationships to each other. However, search engines focus on providing lists of individual documents that match specified criteria, and generally do not provide access to information in the index in manners supported by relational database management systems. For example, search engines typically do not support queries that specify join operations or merge metadata field values from different document types to form a virtual document type. Attempts to enable use of relational database type queries with a full text search engine index have been based upon integrating full text search capabilities into a relational database itself.